Instagram has brainwashed me into vegetarianism, or rather what is now called being “plant-based”. It starts with those “reels” which bombard you when you’re enjoying a friend’s party snaps. A cheery bloke is doing something with beans which only takes two minutes, or so he’d have you believe.
Then the algorithm, sensing weakness, sends you a young woman called @natsnourishments making fregula. Looks great, whatever fregula is. Cupboards are rummaged, new spices bought, you have a go and it tastes kind of zingy, so next day you’re making pesto with cavolo nero.
The fall in weekly meat consumption, from 976g to 854g in a year, is blamed mainly on inflationary food prices. But Instagram veggie chefs with millions of followers must have played a part.
I’ve dozens of cookbooks I never open. I’m jaded from decades of family meals. (Dinner, again? Must I?) But I’m being revivified by a twentysomething generation which, unable to afford houses, is consoling itself by learning to cook. Beautifully — and without meat. Without ever making a conscious decision, I’ve become the person who orders roast cauliflower in a top steak restaurant.
Disordered policing
2023 will go down as the year of protest. Demonstrators have climbed gantries over motorways; blocked streets to stop commuters getting to work; they’ve thrown soup at paintings, glitter at a party leader, orange confetti at an ex-chancellor on his wedding day; they’ve glued themselves to the Oxford Union floor to cancel a feminist speech and a theatre stage to stop Les Mis; they’ve ripped down posters of kidnapped children, graffitied Nelson’s column, screamed “f*** you!” at women conference delegates arriving to discuss male violence and FGM.
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Not once have the police got heavy. They picked up Just Stop Oil protesters tenderly, left Hizb ut-Tahrir free to preach hate. So I think back to the Sarah Everard vigil in 2021, the Met marching over flowers laid around the Clapham Common bandstand to roughhouse sad women holding tealights. Why? Because Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was one of their own? Or because women don’t matter and never declare jihad?
Why I prefer cats
Owners feel less deeply about cats than dogs, University of Copenhagen researchers have found, as if that’s a bad thing. The joy of cats is that although decorative, amusing and, about once a year, consoling, you never fret over their emotional state.
Dog people do little else: is my dog bored, will he pine if I go to Sainsbury’s alone, does he need a natty winter coat, is he so lonely I should buy him a friend? Dogs are deep: they express loyalty and love and my childhood labrador had a sense of humour. Naturally then, as researchers found, we spend more on vets’ bills so they don’t die. But I love the shallowness of cats. They’re for people who want a casual relationship, not a pet marriage. Apart from breakfast, when they materialise to grub for “wet food” pouches, I barely know where they are.
Warm goodbye
Next to me at dinner was a feng shui consultant who was compiling her five essential rules. Number one, she said, is not keeping ashes of ancestors in the house. Bad energy. She looked alarmed when I said my mother’s remains sit in my office in their cardboard tube.
I’d planned to scatter them this month on what would have been her 100th birthday — she died just short of 99 — maybe in Scarborough, which she loved. But as the date drew near, I wondered if she’d want to say goodbye to me and her grandsons on a cold, gloomy beach. She was the queen of all things cosy. And I realised, to my great surprise, since I can’t bear mawkishness about death, that I’m comforted by her ashes.
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So on my mum’s centenary this Sunday we will raise a glass, maybe bake her parkin recipe and she will stay unscattered for now, whatever the negative vibes.
